Almost 200 years ago, Juan Martín, owner of a property in Albuñol (Granada), discovered a cave not far from the sea. Access was difficult, the roof was infested with bats and the floor was covered in guano. Those were the days of Chilean nitrate, the fertilizer made from the droppings of foreign birds. The bat cave became the most important natural source of nitrogen on the Iberian Peninsula. During its exploitation in 1857, red veins were discovered, leading to the belief that it contained galena, a mineral rich in lead. It was the worst thing that could have happened to the cave. Between guano and lead, between need and greed, the miners plundered everything that was inside.
In the depths of the cavity they found a gallery converted into a cemetery, with dozens of partially mummified human remains and typical grave trousseau, utensils, bone awls, arrowheads, stone tools… And also baskets and twenty Esparto sandals. The curse was completed when a gold tiara was found on one of the corpses. This caused an uproar among those in need. Of the nearly 70 corpses, only the skull of a child remains in the National Archaeological Museum. It is now known that basket weaving and Esparteñas are the oldest in Europe.
A collaborative effort by around twenty scientists from various disciplines, from geology to history, analyzed 14 of the dozens of Esparto objects from the Bat Cave using current techniques and methods, and some of them are the oldest ever found. University of Alcalá archaeologist and lead author of the new study, Francisco Martínez, emphasizes that there are two major groups of Esparto objects and materials. “The four best-preserved ones are around 9,500 years old and date from the Mesolithic period, two millennia before agriculture came to the region,” he emphasizes.
These esparto baskets are 9,500 years old. Similar techniques are still used today when working with esparto grass, which is preserved in southeastern Spain. MUTERMUR project
This means that those who made them were hunter-gatherers. Because of this dating, these items, all baskets, are considered to be the oldest in southern Europe and probably in all of Eurasia. The baskets, like everything else in the cave, had a grave function. Some still contained hair and gifts such as poppy seeds, elements that are currently being analyzed and the results of which will later be presented as part of the site’s research project, MUTERMUR.
A discovery from the 19th century
Ten years after the looting of the Bat Cave began, Almería lawyer and archaeologist Manuel Góngora y Martínez, who at the time held the chair of universal history at the University of Granada, traveled to Albuñol and visited the cave. There he found scattered bones and objects, many of which had been charred by the mining boiler fire. Góngora pulled out what he could, interviewed neighbors, bought dozens of archaeological remains from them and concluded that they were prehistoric remains. His work takes up half of his 1868 book Prehistoric Antiquities of Andalusia.
Official archeology, led by the painter and archaeologist Manuel Gómez Moreno, doubted the authenticity of the finds found in the cave. Góngora died without the value of what he found being recognized, and his family donated his collection to the archaeological and anthropological museums of the time. We had to wait a century, until the 1970s, before the first particle accelerator in Madrid could use carbon-14 dating to determine that Góngora was right. Years later, successive dating assigned the materials to the beginning of the European Neolithic.
“Almost all of the sandals were children’s sandals; their size would correspond to a 37 today. “They were buried with them.”
Francisco Martínez, archaeologist at the University of Alcalá
Other visitors to the cave over the following centuries left their own mourning baskets, also made of esparto grass. But there was something else. Already in his book, Góngora emphasized that he had recovered a few dozen Esparteñas. “Almost all of the sandals were children’s sandals; their size would correspond to a 37 today. They buried her with them,” says Martínez. Radiocarbon dating estimates its age at 6,200 years. Prior to this study, published in the journal Science Advances, the oldest prehistoric shoemaking was a type of espadrille found at a site in Armenia and dated to 5,500 years ago. For comparison: the leather ankle boots on plant fiber sandals that Ötzi, the Iceman, wore are 5,300 years old. Beyond the dating, Martínez is fascinated by the fact that two worlds as different as those of hunter-gatherers and that of Neolithic farmers “are united by esparto.”
Autonomous University of Barcelona researcher and co-author of the study, María Herrero, is working on a dissertation on prehistoric plant fibers. Regarding basket weaving, Herrero recalls that even older fragments of esparto, dating back 12,500 years, have been found at the site of Les Coves de Santa Maira (Alicante), but “there is nothing like it, so well preserved, with so much decoration and Diversity.” “of techniques like bat cave basket weaving.”
When it comes to sandals, “there is no footwear in Europe that beats espadrilles,” he adds. Of almost all of them, only the soles remain, but a few examples have stripes that stand out, which, as the prehistorian points out, “were crossed and fastened at the ankle, as in beach sandals today.” The illustrator of Góngora’s book has them 150 years ago 1970s (see image below). Although all of the esparto grass found in the cave was used for burial purposes, Herrero points out a clear difference. The baskets and other unidentified items from the Mesolithic period, the oldest, are neither used nor worn, ” they were part of the offering”. Meanwhile, the later Neolithic baskets and sandals were worn and “had accompanied the deceased in his life”, he comments. Regarding technology, Herrero highlights that “some techniques used, such as sewn spiral baskets, unite both eras, but also connect the cave with other sites such as La Draga in Banyoles, Girona.” Even today, the researcher emphasizes, “esparto grass continues to be processed as in the bat cave.”
This page from the work “Prehistoric Antiquities of Andalusia” by Manuel Góngora y Martínez shows, at the bottom left, what the Esparteñas they found in the cave looked like. Virtual Library of Andalusia
Part of the wonder of this story is that prehistory was written by enduring things: the bones of human fossils, those of animals converted into utensils or weapons, and, most of all, the stone industry, stones. It is not for nothing that the major prehistoric periods – Paleo, Meso or Neo – have the suffix “lithic”. All of these things exist in the bat cave, but what you only find here and almost nowhere else are things made from fibers extracted from an herb, Macrochloa tenacissima. In other latitudes the plant has flat leaves, but in dry areas such as Albuñol they were and are curled up to form threads.
The problem is that anything made from organic materials, and esparto grass is one of them, is doomed to disappear, especially in a cave. Geologist from the Oceanographic Center of the Canary Islands of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (CSIC) and co-author of the study, José Antonio Lozano, says: “In any other place, the baskets and sandals would have disappeared.” Organic material basically disappears through water, which increases reproduction facilitated by bacteria that eat organic material.” But “due to the climate of the area and the topography and morphology of the cave,” there is no humidity here, explains the expert. In addition, the location of the cavity favors the penetration of winds, which dry out the interior even more. “That means there are hardly any speleothems.” [estalactitas o estalagmitas, por ejemplo]. This is unique in Europe,” he concludes.
The same dryness that preserved their Esparteñas also mummified their wearers. Already 155 years ago, the archaeologist Góngora y Martínez wrote in his book that the cave must have had something special and lamented its looting: “The dryness of the place, the nitro with which the walls were covered …” [sic] Another hard-to-name agent had perfectly preserved the bodies and tragedies [sic] and utensils. For more than 40 centuries this necropolis was respected. Don’t tear it up in one day like crazy people. [sic] “Fool.”
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